The question might seem a bit cliched but the fact is that i don’t think the internet is a very reliable source of this information. The best people to ask this question is to those who have experienced it. So, according to you, what do you think are the best colleges to earn a degree in physics and do research. The list should take into consideration ALL factors that are important like for example the fraction of people getting PHDs etc.
Thanks
You could go several ways:
– Tech-focused schools such as Caltech, MIT, RPI and Harvey Mudd.
– Private Universities such as Princeton, Harvard, Cornell and Rice.
– Public Universities such as UC-Berkeley.
– Purely undergraduate-focused colleges such as Williams, Swarthmore, Amherst, Hamilton, Wesleyan, Reed, Haverford, Colgate, Wellesley, Middlebury, Oberlin, Macalester, Bucknell, Mt. Holyoke and Franklin & Marshall.
The best college you can get into.
Well, there’s a lot of ways to consider this.
First off: If you want to do research, go into this with the expectation of going into higher education after going to college (grad school, PhD). You can certainly do research while getting your degree in undergrad physics, but will you get hired into a research position after completing a bachelors? Likely not. This is a field that tends to require/value extensive education.
–Getting into the best-ranked college that you can is not a bad idea, because you’ll likely have high name recognition from a grad school. However, your GPA might be lower than you want when applying to grad school if you get into the most competitive school that you possibly can.
–You’re going to want a school that allows you to do research. This is a tough one, because it seems simple on the surface. All schools brag about their undergrad research programs. “75% of our undergrads participate in research during their time at (blank college)!” Sounds good, doesn’t it?
The reality of that is is that those students are probably doing work under a professor’s research umbrella, picking up scraps here and there, being fifth author on a paper or two that was within their field but on a subject that they didn’t really care about. Now that’s okay! There’s nothing wrong with that to get your research career started. But if you really, really know what you love (and I don’t mean “I love physics”, I mean “I love mapping the trajectory of artificial solar neutrinos”-- you’re going to be unhappy with the research opportunities at most undergrad colleges.
–So you’re going to need to look at a couple of things. Take a look at a list of top-PhD contributor schools (I’ll link it below). Surprise surprise, it’s not filled with ivies. In fact, quite a few are liberal arts colleges. LACs are GREAT because they give you lots of 1:1 time with profs, often have flexible prereq requirements (or none at all). They push you to take a more philosophical approach (which is important in a field like physics), and give amazing financial aid.
Second, look at the volume of papers published by the school. If you know what you’re interested in, type it into Google Scholar, sort by 2010->, and take a look at what school these papers came from. Off the top of my head, I know that I see Georgia Tech a lot, UC Irvine, Texas A&M, Caltech, etc. when reading papers. It really depends on your field of interest.
Third, physics requires a lot of interesting (but cumbersome and EXPENSIVE) equipment. Exposure to this is often in outside facilities that you intern in. Take that into consideration when looking at colleges. Montana has some great schools, but do they have NASA campuses and multiple accelerators nearby? No.
Here’s the “colleges that produce PhDs” link-
http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/
Good luck!
Following on @newkidnewtrix here is a list from a non Reed site with similar results. It is more interesting if you scroll a bit and look at their very large PDF which divides the results by broad discipline. You will see that the results are very similar to the Reed site. I think that Swarthmore updates more often than Reed. In the Broad discipline PDF you will see that both Reed and New Mexico Tech beat MIT for percent of PhD in physical sciences.
http://www.swarthmore.edu/institutional-research/doctorates-awarded
My own son is at Reed trying to decide if he wants physics/math or econ/math. I know totally different but he says that physics is fun and econ is interesting. Reed is a school that has a required qualifying exam and thesis so you will get research. Like other liberal arts colleges it has no graduate students, meaning students become TAs as early as sophomore year and can participate in research. My son has applied to be a physics grader for next year as a second year student.
So you really have to look at the end goal. If you are going for a PhD then it is not always “the best school you can get into” as mentioned above. It is the best PhD feeder schools. If you want the ability to do real research and work with professors you may want to consider a small liberal arts school. I am partial to Reed but it is not a school for everyone. It has a very specific social vibe. Look for fit within the list of feeder schools.
Beware of incomparable denominators.
The denominators in these “%PhD” statistics are NOT “all the students at an institution who come in wanting to major in physics and get a PhD in physics, and are smart enough to get a PhD in physics.”.
They are “everyone who is attending that university/college in any capacity whatsoever, regardless of interests, program of studies, talent, and goals”.
Liberal arts colleges are relatively homogeneous. Students attending the Arts & Sciences colleges at universities may have goals similar to those attending the stand-alone LACs. However they are lumped in with all the other colleges/ programs at the university for purpose of the denominator, without distinction.
^In other words, how many graduates are drawn toward business and professional degrees? How many are drawn to the arts? The NESCAC colleges, in general, are always going to be divided between economics majors who want to go on to Wall Street careers and the math and science hooks who are most likely to go on to pursue doctorates. Wesleyan and Amherst are examples of LACs that are most decidedly NOT homogenous.
While it’s a nice chart for the Reed viewbook, the lists are far less helpful than they initially appear.
(1) The PhD production lists divide the number of PhD graduates in a given field by the total number of graduates from a baccalaureate institution. That is quite different from dividing the number of PhDs produced by the number of BA/BS graduates in that major from any given college, which would provide much more accurate and interesting statistics. For example, @LKnomad states above that Reed outperforms MIT in producing physics PhDs. In fact, MIT has produced 177 PhDs in physics in the last decade compared to Reed’s 39, 4.54 times as many. If one looks at the relative numbers of MIT and Reed students majoring in physics, MIT has ~4.5 times as many as Reed…so the PhD production rates are virtually identical. That is still immensely impressive for a liberal arts college, naturally.
(2) As a corollary to the above, the problem with comparing LACs and universities using overall baccalaureate counts is that universities, in contrast to LACs, have many fields that don’t require a PhD or for which a master’s degree is a terminal degree. In fact, the vast majority of students at universities are in fields that don’t require a PhD. Universities with colleges of music, agriculture, engineering, architecture, journalism, etc. will have hundreds or thousands of students who aren’t aiming for a PhD. Hardly a comparison of apples and apples!
(3) The PhD production lists reveal nothing about the success rates of applicants or the quality of graduate programs to which students are admitted. To be blunt, it is far more impressive to have only 3 applicants apply to graduate school but have a 100% placement rate at Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia than to have 12 students apply and 6 of them get admitted to graduate school at Louisiana State.
Finally, I’ll note that undergraduates at universities are much more likely to interact with PhD students, which may strongly discourage them from following that route. Graduate school can be incredibly stressful and disheartening. I’m friends with PhD students from a spectrum of colleges, from Brown to Michigan, and I don’t know of any who haven’t thought at least once about dropping out, and more than a few get regular counseling. Students who haven’t been exposed to the darker side of academia – high schoolers and many LAC students – often have a much rosier view of graduate school.
It is common for undergraduates everywhere to work under their advisor’s umbrella, and I think you are drawing much more of a distinction than exists. In fact, the same holds true for graduate school in the sciences, at least until one develops a research project for a dissertation. PhD programs in the sciences are essentially apprenticeships.
The benefit to LACs is that students can be involved with research almost immediately, whereas labs at universities are sometimes hesitant to take on students before their sophomore or junior year. That said, many places are perfectly amenable to undergraduates jumping into research as early as late in their freshman year or the summer after. Much depends on a student’s academic preparation, maturity, and motivation. Professors will not come to you offering opportunities, but many are perfectly willing to work with a motivated and capable student who comes to them with specific research interests and a willingness to learn.
The other advantage to LACs, of course, is that even introductory courses are often small (<30 students), whereas intro courses in the sciences at universities can have dozens or even hundreds of students, a much more impersonal environment. That said, you should check the course listings for an accurate idea of course sizes at each college of interest. LACs can have surprisingly large classes, and universities can have very small classes, so it’s best to scope each institution out separately.
My kid is at Harvey Mudd, and has had research opportunities on campus every summer starting after freshman year (and including an offer to stay and research the summer after graduating before heading off to grad school in the fall). She also researched during the school year starting junior year.
You can find a relevant opinion in Forbes written by the chairman of the Union College physics department:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2015/04/10/why-small-colleges-are-great-for-science-students/
@astrofan, additional recommendations.
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/infographics/top-feeders-phd-programs
I can share my ds’s experience as an alternative perspective b/c it is counter to all of the answers you have currently received. His college selection was directed by our very limited budget, not a list of top physics programs or even a list of schools where he would likely be accepted even though he was a very competitive applicant. As a high school student he had attended SSP, had worked for a prof in his lab at a local university, had taken 5 cal up physics courses (similar level math courses as well) at our local university, etc.
He is currently a rising sr at the University of Alabama. He has been actively involved in research on campus since his freshman yr. He is part of a team under direct mentorship of a professor, not a grad or postdoc. He has applied to REUs the past 2 summers and has been accepted by multiple top programs both years. He has been able to take grad level courses as an UG (and have them paid for by his scholarship $$.) He took the physics GRE in the spring and received an excellent score.
He will be applying to grad school this fall. I am not concerned that his UG degree from Bama will harm him during the application process. He has friends from the dept who have been accepted to grad programs at Cornell and JHU. Another student is at Stanford, etc.
During my ds’s application season his sr yr of high school, his first question for every dept was about UG research. It was his absolute filter after costs. If a school’s dept was not enthusiastic about UGs working with profs, he pretty much eliminated the school from his list. And, believe it or not, that was an actual response he received more than once. One dept told him that profs were typically too busy to take on UGs. Another dept told him that their UGs worked for grad students and that he already had more direct research experience than most of their UGs. Neither school remained a contender.
All that to say, ask depts questions. Find out about their UG research opportunities. Ask them what the UG students from their dept are doing after graduation. Check out their course offerings and the frequency of the offerings. Read the profiles of their professors and the research they are conducting, etc.
Yes.
So one might think that big state universities suffer by comparison, in PhD per capita outcomes, only because many of their undergraduates choose to major in fields like engineering where a terminal BA is a very marketable degree.
To explore this possibility, it is tedious but not impossible to normalize by program size as well as by institution size.
John Siegrfried and Wendy Stock (2006) did this in analyzing the undergraduate origins of economics PhDs. The thing is, relatively big (and relatively prestigious) research universities seem to do even more poorly (compared to LACs) when you normalize by program size (in economics, anyway, and for the targeted time period). One could try to repeat what they did for STEM/physics.
At any rate, all sorts of colleges can and do produce alumni who earn doctorates.
Although I like LACs, for some top students who are able and willing to pursue all available opportunities, it may make more sense to choose a larger school with first-rate facilities, many distinguished professors, lots of courses, and bleeding-edge research projects. Cornell, Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. A few top private universities (UChicago, Columbia, Brown) may provide the best of both worlds (RU resources, LAC-like class and program sizes) … if you can get in.
Some bedtime reading material:
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/
https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/undergrad/bachreport-p-04.pdf
https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/undergrad/bachdegrees-p-10.pdf
Also, check if the usual junior/senior level physics courses are offered at a reasonable frequency. Physics is often a small major, so some schools may have small physics departments that struggle to offer a “complete” physics major (occasionally, physics major programs become candidates for budget cuts due to the very small number of students in physics at those schools).
The usual junior/senior level physics courses:
In addition, advanced math courses like real and complex analysis are desirable.
some more:
"Physics bachelor’s
receiving their degrees
from departments that
level
physics degrees are
more likely to pursue
graduate study in
physics."
https://studylib.net/doc/11184234/physics-bachelor%E2%80%99s-initial-employment
“•Physics bachelors from large departments are more likely to attend graduate or professional school with the intention of earning a degree in any field than physics bachelors from smaller departments (Figure 1).
•Graduates of large departments rate their physics and math preparation for a career more highly than graduates of smaller departments”
http://docplayer.net/45350573-Does-it-matter-where-i-go-to-college.html
(maybe that’s the same as prior linked article…)
re#14: “Also, check if the usual junior/senior level physics courses are offered at a reasonable frequency”
Beware courses given only in a single section, every other year have potential to conflict with other courses you might want to take, at that one time you will be able to take it.
Re #12: Econ is particularly tough, since so many undergrad Econ majors, at institutions that have good recruiting, use it as a platform to get jobs in business, or go to MBA school, and have no intention from the outset of getting a PhD. While others at the same institution do have that interest. This is true of any major, but econ perhaps more than many, since it is perceived to relate so closely to business. Also some people getting econ PhDs did not major in econ as an undergrad, but rather something like engineering or physical sciences.
When nobody (except Peace Corps, et al) is coming to your campus to recruit, other options besides grad school may seem less alluring than at other schools that are well recruited…
I’ve attempted quick-and-dirty calculations of physics PhD production, normalized by program size (not institution size), for 15 schools including Ivies, public Ivies, and LACs. Preliminary findings:
I wouldn’t take these findings to the bank, but they do seem consistent with @moneydad’s precaution (“beware of incomparable denominators”). Metrics generated over entire college populations may not reflect what’s going on at individual program levels.
I first realized the issue with denominators a long time ago. There was a guy who found out how many lawyers were graduates of each school, put that number over the school’s total enrollment, and created an ordered list from that.
Then he justified that by saying that lawyers make more money, so everybody would want to be a lawyer if only they could make it, so it’s justified to use a denominator consisting of all students, regardless of interests ,majors, talent and objectives.
So I thought back to my own education. I attended a multi-college university where only 1/3 of the students are enrolled in its Arts & sciences college. A decent number of the Arts & Sciences students went on to law school. There was another college there that also produced a lot of future lawyers. But, surprise, surprise, not many people enrolled in the Colleges of : Architecture, Engineering, Agriculture, Hotel Administration … applied to law school. These colleges did not enroll students with a profile of majors and interests similar to that at a typical liberal arts college. So typical liberal arts colleges showed higher on these % of law school matriculants measures, where the whole university was used for a denominator.
Did the physical presence of some students down the hall who were studying Hotel Administration have any negative effect on my friend Dave’s ability to pursue law school? Evidently not, he’s a lawyer…
Did they impede my more-talented-than-me classmates from pursuing studies towards a physical sciences PhD? Certainly not. I think it’s fair to say the Hotel students, et. al., were not in our upper-level physics classes.
These students were irrelevant. So why were they in the denominator? And if you have to have them in the denominator, because data is not broken out by college and some hotel, et. al. students did go to law school- well does this statistic then mean anything of significance anymore, to someone applying to the Arts & Sciences college, and only that college, with the intent of going to law school?
No. It doesn’t. The people who wanted to go to law school, and were smart enough, went. Nobody in some other college that happened to be located on the same campus, took their LSATs for them. Or took their courses and got their grades.They did all that themselves. Individually. My observation was people from there generally achieved the outcomes they deserved. Based on their individual merits.